It was July.  She had come home after a visit to Miss Nussey.

In that month she wrote that chapter of Shirley which is headed “The Valley of the Shadow”.  The book (begun more than eighteen months before) fairly quivers with the shock that cut it in two.

It was finished somewhere in September of that year of Anne’s death.  Charlotte went up to London.  She saw Thackeray.  She learned to accept the fact of her celebrity.

Somehow the years passed, the years of Charlotte’s continuous celebrity, and of those literary letters that take so disproportionate a part in her correspondence that she seems at last to have forgotten; she seems to belong to the world rather than to Haworth.  And the world seems full of Charlotte; the world that had no place for Emily.  And yet Wuthering Heights had followed Shirley.  It had been republished with Charlotte’s introduction, her vindication of Emily.  It brought more fame for Charlotte, but none—­yet—­for Emily.

Two years later came Villette.  Charlotte went up to London a second time and saw Thackeray again.  And there were more letters, the admirable but slightly self-conscious letters of the literary woman, artificially assured.  They might deceive you, only the other letters, the letters to Ellen Nussey go on; they come palpitating with the life of Charlotte Bronte’s soul that had in it nothing of the literary taint.  You see in them how, body and soul, Haworth claims her and holds her, and will not let her go.

Nor does she desire now to be let go.  Her life at Haworth is part of Emily’s life; it partakes of the immortality of the unforgotten dead.  London and Thackeray, the Smiths, Mrs. Gaskell, and Miss Martineau, Sir John and Lady Kay-Shuttleworth, her celebrity and the little train of cheerful, unfamiliar circumstances, all these things sink into insignificance beside it.  They are all extraneous somehow, and out of keeping.  Nothing that her biographers have done (when they have done their worst) can destroy or even diminish the effect her life gives of unity, of fitness, of profound and tragic harmony.  It was Mrs. Gaskell’s sense of this effect that made her work a masterpiece.

And in her marriage, at Haworth, to her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls, the marriage that cut short her life and made an end of her celebrity, Charlotte Bronte followed before all things her instinct for fitness, for unity, for harmony.  It was exquisitely in keeping.  It did no violence to her memories, her simplicities and sanctities.  It found her in the apathy of exhaustion, and it was yet one with all that was passionate in her and undying.  She went to it one morning in May, all white and drooping, in her modest gown and that poor little bridal bonnet with its wreath of snowdrops, symbolic of all the timidities, the reluctances, the cold austerities of spring roused in the lap of winter, and yet she found in it the secret fire of youth.  She went to it afraid; and in her third month of marriage she still gives a cry wrung from the memory of her fear.  “Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange and perilous thing for a woman to become a wife.”